Planning prepares you to use small design loops throughout an event.
When you begin facilitating a class, session, or workshop, you move from the big loop of design and planning into the small one. The big loop accounts for the overall design of your day - its agenda, the activities in it, and the opportunities you build in for feedback from your audience (such as pre- and post-surveys).
The small loops are all the decisions you make throughout the day according to what happens in real time - in the moment of teaching and learning as we’ve framed it.
While it might seem scary to plan for improvisation - to anticipate needing to change a carefully design plan - learning to use small loops of testing and iteration throughout an event is a key part of moving your facilitation practice forward.
You’re planning to change what you do in response to your learners’ needs. That might be scary, but it is also right and good. Each time you teach something you have a chance to test and improve your assumptions and design. The more adept you become at making quick, needs-fulfilling shifts during an event, the better a facilitator you will become.
That’s not to say you need to anticipate and build in a thousand options for each activity you plan. Or that you need to be the perfect improv artist from the start. It means that you should prepare yourself to make decisions about timing, sequencing, and levels of support in the middle of your work with learners.
As you read the room, you’ll be able to look and listen for signs of delight and engagement, as well for signs of confusion and frustration. Being able to take a step back from “controlling” a successful lesson is as important as being able to step in with an alternative activity, better explanation, or quick shortcut when things go askew.
To set yourself up to take advantage of the feedback you get during an event, look at your plans and think of key moments when you introduce a new idea or ask learners to try something on their own. At those key junctures and transitions, remind yourself to stop, read the room, and and evaluate how things are going for your audience. Think about
- Affirming your learners’ work. Some of your learners will need to hear you say, “You can do this,” or, “When I tried this the first time…I can’t even. It was so tough for me, too!”
- Connecting the dots. Some of your learners will need you to explain the connections you see between ideas and activities or from activity to activity. You can do a think-aloud to show them how different pieces of content relate to each other.
- Asking for feedback. Take a minute to poll your learners and listen to what they have to say about an activity. Ask them how they might localize it or improve it. If they can summarize the point of the activity and imagine transferring it to another context for another audience, they’ve learned it well. If they voice some confusion or concern, you can work through it for the benefit of the whole group.
- Demoing. Even though some learners will be ready to move ahead without you in an activity, many will need or want you to demo your work at least once. This lets them know that they’re “doing it right” and gives them an example of a finished product.
- Pacing. Slow down if you see a lot of confused looks. Go back a step. Conversely, if everyone finishes a twenty-minute activity in ten minutes, move on; don’t make your learners sit through dead airtime just because the agenda says so.
- Sequencing. Does it make sense to skip an activity for now and come back to it later? Does something you originally planned for the afternoon suddenly make total sense as a follow-up activity in the morning? Don’t be afraid to move it and see how it goes.
- Punting. Sometimes an activity fails completely. It causes more confusion than empowerment or relief. Punt it. Tell your learners straight up: “This isn’t working. Let’s just talk about the big ideas and then try something else together. I’m sorry this activity didn’t work.” Move on to the next one confident that it will.
This isn’t a checklist of what you need to do as a facilitator. There’s no burden on you to punt twice, demo once, and affirm three times during an event. However, it is your responsibility to assess yourself and serve your audience as best you can during an event.
Over time you’ll discover “greatest hits” activities that work fairly consistently across audiences. You’ll get better and better at predicting what might work as you do big loop design. You’ll learn to use small loop design as a way to experiment with new activities or new steps in old ones.
For example, if you’re always making connections or asking for feedback on the fly, you can plan those small-loop moments in the big loop designs for your next event. Did you have to connect the dots every time today? Plan to do it next time. Did you hear awesome suggestion for adapting a lesson today? Plan to ask for feedback more frequently next time.
For now, focus on identifying a few turning points in your agenda and plan to pause, assess, and react to what’s going on in the room at those times.
When we talk about reading the room, we’re talking about how happy and engaged your learners’ seem to be with your facilitation and content. While you’re assessing the mood of the room, you’re also assessing your own work as a designer and facilitator.
You read the room to figure out what you can do to keep things going well or what you can change when things go wrong. Reading the room isn’t an opportunity to blame your audience or activity; it’s a chance to practice and act on self-reflection.
In “Empowering Change Makers,” Vanessa Rhinesmith, Program Manager for the Ford-Mozilla Open Web Fellows, puts it like this:
Read the room — oh, and the feedback. Reading the room and the state of those who are in the room is both an art and a science. It builds on the idea of being an enabler of the experience and that means listening as well as observing to meet the needs of your participants. There are direct ways to do this: we set up a sheet of paper at the end of each day for Plus/Delta; an easy way to identify what’s working, what isn’t, and what’s missing (learn more about the exercise). There are indirect ways: observing body language and the cadence / flow of the conversation. Is the group engaged — or disengaged in the conversation? Are eyes active — or glazed (source)? Directly and indirectly reading the room enabled us to needs in real time.
“Teach Small” describes reading the room like this:
Part of cultivating your facilitation skills means learning to read the room. When you look around, pay attention to people’s faces and make note of what they’re saying and what they’re doing. Are they engaged and on-task? (Remember, this looks different for different people.) Have they checked out? Are they on social media? Hungry? Bored? Flipping through their phones? When they ask questions, are their voices full of wonder or frustration? Trust yourself to recognize the emotional tenor of the room and shift your facilitation to align what you’re teaching with things that matter to your participants. Use humor and humility to correct course. Above all, don’t ignore how people are feeling or push through an agenda despite their feelings. Pause, ask yourself what you might need in a similar, off-kilter situation, and take the steps you’d want others to take for you in correcting course during a workshop. If you feel like you don’t have a repertoire or toolbox of fixes, like energizing icebreakers or alternative ways to explain things, ask a co-facilitator for help on-the-spot and then take up targeted professional development between events.
Be intentional about reading the room. Make plans to stop and ask yourself how things are going based on the evidence you see all around you. This is small loop design during an event. The more you practice it, the better you’ll get at managing the flow of the day at an event and building trust and confidence between yourself and your audience. Small loop design, in this context, is paying attention to your audience and showing your care for your learners. We’ll talk more about those things in later sections, but all of them begin with learning how to apply small loops of design and feedback to your work in the moment of teaching and learning.
Look at this example and use it as a model for creating your own facilitation flow chart for an upcoming event. Can you identify moments when you think it will be crucial to read the room? When it will be important to know whether or not your learners are with you?
Identify those spots and write in a few examples of small-loop actions you might take to see how things are going and make any changes that might improve an activity for your learners.